Hailing straight from the country of Belarus, Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum gained attention to the public eye with their demo, in 2013, because of their absurdly lengthy and convoluted band name and song titles, but remained in our mind because their music was frankly good. They’re playing some [very] brutal death metal with a touch of tech-death and atmospheric thrown in for good measure. Moreover, behind the name lies hidden a very interesting, occult world and concept. It is, according to the band itself, an agglutinative neologism, with loans from Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian and Sumerian terms of “the Chaosatanic tradition”. I quote, “it entirely reveals the unutterable name of the antiuniverse [sic]. When divided into fragments, it creates the magic spell of the formless Lords of the prior Darkness”. That formula is: Eximpe-ritu-serqethh-zeb[ul]ib-šiptu-gakkath-šu[r]l-welia[l]r-za-xu[l]ł-um. So, I guess, don’t repeat it thrice.

Adding to the mystery, the exoplanet, to the West of which lies ethereal matter into which the ashes of Alulim, also known as PSR B1620-26 b, has a few interesting unofficial names: Mathuselah, and The Genesis Planet. These were given because of the unfathomable age of the object: as it orbits a white dwarf and a pulsar (two “dead” stars), it must be very ancient, and its age is estimated at 12.7 billion years. Let’s go through some of the other names that are found throughout the album title. Alulim was the first King of the city of Eridu and the Sumer civilization. He allegedly reigned for 28,000 years, which is more than most do with their life. Unfortunately, what remains now are merely his disembodied ashes, but fret not because they will probably be reincarnated during the course of this album! Next up, Nwn-Hu-Kek-Amon seems like an aggregate of four Egyptian deities, the first of which, Nwn, or Nun, is the oldest Egyptian God, procreator of the Sun God and represents the chaotic primeval waters. Hu is the original verb, the first word, which was uttered by Atum while ejaculating, giving birth to nine deities: the Ennead. Hu was often portrayed as an important figure alongside Thoth, who is mentioned in the final track. Kek is the deification of Darkness; obscurity, unknown, chaos, and Amon became the ruler of the city of Thebes, and later fused with the Sun God to become Amun-Ra. Once again, more than you’ll probably ever do. So, apparently, the “obcervatory” [sic] of Nwn, Hu, Kek, and Amon contains towers, in which resides the future, temporally similar to the Eternity..? Man, the syntax in these titles are truly nauseating, as well as the overuse of the alternatively spelled preposition “ov”…

Anyways, this has to do with “Resonance Transformers”, actuated by “Pre-Axes Civilizations”, which I can only assume refer to Karl Jaspers’s Achsenzeit, or Axial Age. This pivotal point in human history took place between the eighth and third centuries BC, when new philosophies appeared throughout the world, as in the Middle-East, Europe, and Asia. I guess those Pre-Axes Civilizations therefore englobe the Hittite Empire, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Shang dynasty in China, the Mycenaean Greece, the Indus Valley civilization, and many others, including the Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Maya culture in México, and the Sumerian civilization of Southern Mesopotamia. If we continue upstream the flow of quasi-gibberish, we can decipher that “Paleocontact” – literally “ancient contact”, probably referring to ancient extraterrestrial beings reaching to humans on Earth – brought here the Founders of “Utterly Ancient Hypostases” – philosophically speaking, super old realities. These founders are seemingly governed by a Cosmotechnical Order, whatever that means. Maybe they are the lords of space-themed technical death metal? In any case, they relate to the “Zodiacal Arc”, the hypersurface of which, through Sîn-Ahhī-Erība’s hexahedral prism, the Singular Emission of the Doctrine of Absolute and All-Absorbing Evil is projected upon. We crossed an interesting name there: Sîn-Ahhī-Erība. He was a king of Assyria who marched against Babylon and Judah, and a great builder to whom is attributed the concept of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He was assassinated by his first son, Aššur-Ahu-Iddin (the son of which, Aššurbanipal, we’ll get to talk about later!)

So, what the hell is going on in that title? First of all, it looks like it’s split in at least two fragments. There’s no punctuation or anything, but the lack of any link whatsoever between “Paleocontact Founders” and “The Utterly Ancient Hypostases” seems to indicate a break of some sort. The first part begins with an action: projecting. What does the unnamed subject here project? The Singular Emission of the Doctrine of Absolute and All-Absorbing Evil. It could be argued that it’s either a singular emission, as there is only one, or in the sense that it is one-of-a-kind, superior in some way. In any case, this emission is projected through the hexahedral prism of Sîn-Ahhī-Erība, who is, as we’ve discussed earlier, an ancient king of Assyria. He owns a hexahedral prism, so that’s pretty sick. Hexahedral could mean it’s a cube, or any other solid with six faces, like a parallelepiped, a truncated pyramid, or a trigonal trapezohedron. Keep that last one in mind because it’s stated in one of the song titles. Moving on, that emission’s projection through this prism is made upon the hypersurface of the Zodiacal arch. First of all, a hypersurface is any surface with one dimension less than the object it is on. For example, the surface of the Earth is the Earth’s hypersurface, since the Earth is tridimensional and its surface has only two dimensions: East-West and North-South, or X and Y. So, then, what is the Zodiacal arch, and how many dimensions does it have? The signs of the Zodiac are constellations near the equatorial plane of the sky, all separated almost homogeneously around 360 degrees, thus forming an arch. It could be said that this arch is bidimensional, because these constellations could be represented as points on a line across the equator, but I think it would be easier to see this as a sort of ribbon onto which are drawn the signs of the Zodiac, running across the night sky and of an incommensurable size. If that huge halo is represented in three dimensions, then its hypersurface is really the area of the ribbon that is either facing towards or away from the Earth. If you imagine yourself running on it, much like the surface of our planet, you could only move two directions: spinward-antispinward and port-starboard, following Larry Niven’s direction system on Ringworld, to which our Zodiacal arch would resemble a lot. There’s one last thing to the first half of the album title: that arch belongs to the Cosmotechnical Order of the Paleocontact Founders. Who are those founders of ancient alien encounters? Many theories trace the contact era at around 10,000 years BC, the dawn of civilization, at the time when the megalithic constructions were to be made: 9,500 BC in Turkey and Sicily, 7,000 BC in Israel, and 4,500 BC in Egypt, to name a few. Nobody really knows who they were, but they all seem to agree that they looked humanoid enough to be revered as Gods by our ancestors. In Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum’s concept, these aliens have a Cosmotechnical Order, by which is governed the Zodiacal arch. Judging by its name, it could be a group of religious adherents or an association of knights. Whichever it is, they follow the precepts of Cosmotechnicality. Once again, dissecting that name, we get something that resembles a lot Astrology: the treating of the celestial bodies, Cosmotechicality being the mechanics of the universe. It’s a bit more all-encompassing, as it treats not only of asters, but of all that is contained within the universe. Let’s recapitulate all that: the Doctrine of absolute and all-absorbing Evil’s singular emission is projected upon the Zodiacal arch’s inner surface through a six-sided prism. The Zodiac ribbon is under the supervision of the Cosmotechnical branch of the alien civilization that visited the Earth more than ten thousand years ago. Got it? Right, let’s move to the second half of that logorrhoea.

The Utterly Ancient Hypostases refer to the the old realities of the pre-axial civilizations, we already discussed that part. It makes sense to talk about those who were present before the eighth century BC, and it also narrows down the time span to which this album refers: between 10,000 and 800 BC. Still, it’s a range of 9,200 years, but it’s better than nothing! These civilizations’s hypostases actuate the Resonance Transformer. At this point, there really is one out of place ov, and I’ll take the liberty of excluding it from my analysis, since I cannot make sense of the title otherwise. Excuse me for doing so, but I assume something was lost in translation from Belarusian to English. This transformer is temporally similar to the future’s eternity. Could they be referring to the theorized heat death scenario of the universe? For those who don’t know, it’s a stage in the universe’s life where no energy is left to make any action, any movement, and is thought to last forever, and to be universally homogeneous. There: an eternity that will happen in the future, and to which the resonance transformer is identical. That means it contains a homogeneous and energetically null substance, and that it modulates resonance by letting it pass through a glimpse of a dead universe. This device is located in the towers of the observatory of Nwn-Hu-Kek-Amon who, as we found out earlier, are four Ancient Egyptian Gods. This observatory incarnates the ashes of Alulim, the first king of the first city. Used in its construction, the observatory gives a new embodiment to the dead king, and floats in the ethereal matter to the West of PSR B1620-26 b. The binary system of PSR B1620-26 is located 12,400 lightyears away, in the constellation of Scorpius, in a globular cluster with the designation of NGC 6121, or Messier 4. It is itself 1.3 degrees West of Antares, one of the brightest stars in the Northern hemisphere’s night sky, and the brightest one of its constellation. Guess what: it is right on the Zodiacal plane, Scorpius being itself one of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Now, 1.3 degrees is a very small difference, as you can see in this picture, where Antares and M4 are really close together. Since it is on the ecliptic of the Earth, it can be seen by the two hemispheres, so you could go out at night and try to spot the ethereal matter to the West of Exoplanet PSR B1620-26 b. I recommend using some kind of telescope. The West of it will be to the right of the object in the Northern hemisphere, and to the left in the Southern one. In summary: the primeval beliefs of civilizations prior to the eighth century BC activate the resonance transformer, which is basically a piece or crystal of our future dead universe, that is located in the towers of Nwn-Hu-Kek-Amon’s observatory, which is made with the ashes of Alulim, in a cloud of gas westward of the Mathuselah exoplanet, in the M4 globular cluster, which itself lies in the Scorpius constellation on the Zodiacal hypersurface.

Now, did the wonderful artwork, painted by Pär Olofsson, did justice to this daunting title? First of all, it’s amazing, and truly captures the occult essence of it all: Egyptian imagery, alien-looking stuff, hooded priests, planets and moons, pyramids, armilla-looking stuff in the background… That definitely gets the overall vibe, but the devil’s in the details. Let’s focus on the figure at the forefront. It looks to me like Horus, the falcon-headed God, usually depicted with a pschent, the double crown, but it looks nothing like what is shown on this cover. Instead, Horus wears the khepresh, blue, or war crown that pharaohs would wear into battle. It’s easily recognizable by the golden cobra snake on its front. It resembles a lot that of Tutankhamun, even though it changed forms through history. Actually, it looks like a mix between the khepresh and the modus, a flat-topped headdress. In addition, it looks like it’s wearing a nemes as well, the striped head cloth of the pharaohs. I expected there to be an ankh of some sort, behind the band’s logo, but apparently there is none. I think it’s worth mentioning, too, that Horus’s consort was Serket, the scorpion goddess, whose name features in the band’s agglutinated name. Remember that the constellation of the Scorpius is where the album’s exoplanet is located. Also, note that Horus’s hands each bear seven fingers, a clear display of Biblical numerology here, where the number 7 means total perfection, completeness. Adding to this, each finger has three phalanges, the number 3 being another symbol of divine perfection and holiness. However, one hand is shown with one finger hidden, possibly meaning that Horus is capable of complete perfection and benevolence, as well as absolute evil. A pyramidal object, emitting fumes sits in front of the deity, priests are watching, at a safe distance, the ritual. Behind the procession is a skyline of pyramids – one is even floating away! -, and floating spheres, planets or moons I suppose. Above them is the starry sky with alien constellations and a device resembling part of an armillary sphere, or spherical astrolabe. In the middle of the background is an imposing figure. I would be very ill-placed to know who this is, but it seems like the astrolabe’s rings and frameworks protrude from it. Could it be that this is the embodiment of Alulim, Nwn-Hu-Kek-Amon’s observatory? That’s not impossible, but it seems fairly far-fetched. It would indeed be an immense megastructure, a hyperstructure! We’ve already talked about the string of cuneiform characters bowing above Horus’s head, the magic spell of the formless Lords of the prior Darkness. And I think that’s it for the cover.

Writing about the band’s name and album title, as well as its cover art, took us more than 2,500 words. I hope this doesn’t get overly popular lest I will really have to decipher the songs’s titles and lyrics, and most probably end up in an asylum before I succeed this. In any case, trying to make sense of occulted meanings in willfully obscure albums is something I really enjoy, even though I don’t always end up with a conclusive answer. I hope this has piqued your interest, or quenched your thirst for answers about Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum and their latest album.